Cell

Stephen King

Yes, folks, it's true-- once again, rumor's of Stephen King's retirement have been greatly exaggerated. Cell is the first of two books he's got coming out in 2006. It is, in some ways, eerily reminiscent of the recent From a Buick 8 (except where that one aped Christine, this one recalls The Stand), but comparing the two is like comparing a Faberge with a five-year-old-decorated Paas creation.

Cell may not be Stephen King at his best-- in the final analysis, the book doesn't hold a candle to Misery, The Stand, or King's other strongest works-- but it's still a good'un. First off, it's great to finally see, after over three decades, a Stephen King zombie novel. Not that these are your regular zombies, though the repeated references to (and dedication to) George Romero should tip you off to where King's mind was. These are the "zombies" of Resident Evil or 28 Days Later...; they're shambling and mindless, but otherwise don't fit the profile. In this case, they've all been zombified by their cell phones. (One sees another amusing Romero parallel already.) Clayton Riddell, an artist in Boston for the week inking a deal for a graphic novel, is walking outdoors downtown when everything hits, and within ten minutes, most of those around him are running around attacking everything in sight, including each other and, in some cases, themselves. After finding another normal human being in the melee, Riddell regroups, heads back to his hotel, and decides to get on with the process of getting home to find out if his wife and kid have survived what is, in essence, the apocalypse.

The parallels to The Stand should be obvious to anyone who's read King's 1978 masterpiece. But rather than grating annoyingly, as the echoes of Christine did in From a Buick 8, King here uses the parallels to make the reader think about an alternate version of what he'd already written, something coming from an obviously different place, but with enough visual and structural similarities for the reader to keep the older book in the back of his head, making comparison after comparison. The later novel does suffer for the comparison most of the time, but not nearly as much as I had originally feared.

And then there's the end of the book.

Man, there were so many people who hated the end of The Dark Tower and, in my estimation, they hated it for all the wrong reasons. I see that happening again with the end of Cell, which has a classic frustrating-horror-movie ending (certain pieces of film infamy will occur to the reader the second he reaches the last page, no doubt. Long live the new flesh!) that ties up exactly zero loose ends and leaves most of the interpretation to the reader; it seems to me that the rank and file, in general, despise this sort of thing. I'll leave it to you to draw any conclusions you wish as to why this is, and how you, as a discerning literary snob, should feel about it.

Me, I liked it, But that shouldn't surprise you.